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Richard Esguerra

Richard wielded a keyboard as an EFF Activist for four years, then indulged in his love of video games with the fine folks of Humble Bundle. After a year, he returned to EFF to help raise funds for a better digital future. Richard has yet to retrieve the mystifyingly fabulous Orb of Zot, and he still takes lots of pictures of his cat.

Last week, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee introduced S. 3325, the "Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008," a bill that proposes a number of alarming changes to copyright law. The bill is the Senate's gift to big content owners, creating new and powerful tools -- many of which will be paid for by your tax dollars -- for the entertainment industry to go after infringers.

Privacy-minded consumers celebrated a victory as the ISP Charter Communications announced a decision to scuttle a controversial advertising plan that would have involved surveillance of customers' Internet traffic -- likely using an invasive technique called deep packet inspection.

This week, the Stanford Center for Internet and Society's Fair Use Project struck a telling blow in the battle to protect fair use. A US District Judge issued an opinion holding that the producers and distributors of the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed are likely to prevail on their fair use defense in a copyright infringement suit brought by Yoko Ono.

We've written previously about the showdown between the states and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over Real ID -- a federal mandate that seeks to turn states' driver's licenses into national identity cards. Several states have rightfully vowed to oppose Real ID because it's expensive and a massive violation of privacy for their citizens.

For weeks, the House has been deliberating on its response to the Senate's FISA Amendments Act, which aims to grant retroactive immunity for telecoms involved in warrantless wiretapping. While it's seemed like a possibility that the House was going to cave and agree to grant immunity, the tides have shifted in a big way in the last few days.